Making a House / Studio eight twentythree

by Sammer Raut

Anuj Daga

Posted on June 27, 2017 by Anuj Daga

Expanding its annual architecture exhibition series, ‘SEA Pavilions’ is an initiative by the School of Environment & Architecture to invite an architect to build an experimental structure on its campus every year. The need for this space of experimentation, particularly for the young, is seen in the proliferation of maker’s asylums, work cooperatives and coffee shops that lend themselves as think-make hubs. It is here that SEA attempts to plug some of the gaps in the need for such spaces in the city.

Pavilions have historically been outbuildings, tents, summerhouses, sheds, ancillary buildings semi open structures in the landscape, and temporary buildings in trade expos. From historical examples like Chinese pavilions to the open layout forms of Mughal architecture as seen at Fatehpur Sikri and the pleasure-palaces of Mandu; and from modern examples like the Barcelona pavilion by Mies Van der Rohe to the recent Serpentine series in London by different architects, the ‘pavilion’ conceptually stands between a functional building and a folie. In that sense it is as useful as it is useless. The pavilion type allows architects to experiment with spatial ideas, freeing architecture from the exigencies and pressures of the market, patrons or utility. In this light, SEA Pavilions can be seen as a testing ground – a laboratory for architects and makers to experiment with prototypical ideas before they take final shape. SEA Pavilions is thus meant to be a live laboratory for space-making.

As a pedagogical approach, another challenge that remains is to look beyond the hegemony of the drawing board to enter the act of constructing space, experimenting with materials, spatial forms and a full-bodied engagement with architecture. In doing so, SEA draws on the experimental formats of biennales and curated exhibitions that create space for new questions to unfold. ‘SEA Pavilion’ aims at creating such an audience for experimental architecture. It aims to provide a platform for young (and older) architects with an urge to do experimental work, hoping to foster an ecology of constant iterative practice, in other words, riyaz. While the ‘self’’ shapes the material through practice, the material in turn shapes the self through the act of riyaz. Here practice, material and space, all fold into each other to unite into a larger whole. This practice thus has the potential to build a certain subjectivity, that of an “energetic self” as opposed to the “productive self”, and by that measure to engender a space for an experimental spirit and not only a productive spirit.

‘Making a House’: The Exhibition

Samir Raut’s pavilion, exhibited as an experiment in ‘Making a House’ on the campus of SEA from April 8th to May 7th 2017, introduces us to the anatomy of his craft-oriented design practice. Over the process of contemplating and eventually building a seven hundred square foot ‘pavilion’ – a house originally meant to be in Ranchi – Samir traverses through several studies of small houses from across the world by means of meticulously crafted scaled models. His method leaps ahead of passive exercises in observation and diagramming in studying precedents. While one may understand mathematical logics and spatial structures through such methods, how does one come close to materiality and tectonics of form in precedent studies? How does one inhabit the detail that brings together two surfaces in a building that creates the corner for us to reside and rest into? These are questions opened up through the practice and display of around thirty models – including iterations, prototypes and miniature.

Originally conceived to be built in rammed earth walls and steel frames, the mock up on site demonstrates a courtyard house that uses cardboard sections to create rooms wrapped around an open centre. A piece of landscape in the center of the pavilion completes the repertoire of materials the architect intends to play with. The structural framework of the pavilion is made from cardboard L-angles put together like a Miesien cruciform column – a language continued for its beams and trusses. These structural members are held together by some 4000 odd nuts and bolts – the most expensive unit of the building! The house has a structural rhythm of 8 feet in plan. The frames are screened with translucent agricultural net, enclosing a series of peripheral rooms within which one enters to encounter the several study models.

At once, the act of building the pavilion reminds us of the story Borges recounts in his famous essay “On Exactitude of Science”. Referring to the exercise of mapping the city to its precise detail, Borges tells us how “…[i]n that Empire, the art of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.” Samir’s endeavor is similar, where his scaled iterations of the house under consideration become the actual house on site, allowing him to study the embodied experience in real-time space. The courtyard in the center seems to be there to register the sky, the changing weathers and the seasons. In the midst of the plants in the courtyard is a scaled model of the pavilion with a miniature courtyard and miniature plants – an exhibition scheme conceived like a Russian doll with nestling spaces. The result is a beautiful layering of scales and visibilities that gives a sense of otherworldliness and ephemerality to the pavilion. In housing the miniatures the pavilion becomes a ‘Wunderkamer’, a pavilion of fractal like curiosities, a mini Columbarium Habitalbille that houses these models of affinity.

Tectonics and the Poetics of Construction

To speak of its construction it would be interesting to consider the architectonics of the pavilion through Kenneth Frampton’s ‘Studies in Tectonic Cultures’.1 In his book, Frampton contemplates on the notion of tectonics in architecture, through its etymological evolution – it comes from the Sanskrit taksan and Greek tekton referring to the carpenter or builder. Theirs is a repeated practice of shaping a material with a limited set of tools, rhythmically, cyclically and even seasonally. In this idea of crafting, making or poiesis is implicit the idea of tectonics. Through such understanding, it is possible to reconsider the ideas of aesthetics and beauty. There remains a great deal to explore in the notions of the limit, the self-critical process of continuous correction and the idea of slowness which breaks the relationship between time and productivity as prescribed by the dogmas of a market economy – not surprisingly, this idea of being highly productive is heightened in the financial capital of Mumbai. In this sense, the practice of taking one’s own time and lamenting and meandering and wandering and sleeping for 8-10 hours or even sipping coffee2 have a great potential to nurture the ideas of slowness as a self-critical process important to continually correct or shift the dominant dogmas in our societies.

Questions for Pedagogy and Practice

The pavilion and its construction leave us with several questions for architectural pedagogy and practice. But first as an architectural institute setting the frameworks for questions, one is tempted to ask, where do we ask these questions from? Do we follow a tradition of distanced disembodied critical practice? Or do we jump in with the practitioner and risk an embodied enquiry? Do we then enjoin the practitioner’s trip – the trip to make a full-scale, almost Borgesian installation of a house to be built elsewhere; the trip to employ an everyday material like card board, otherwise used for packing, and elevate it to the level of poetic detailing? A trip to have the ambition of making 52 crafted scaled models of houses of similar sizes to the one he is building and ending up making nine, but still making the full scale house to house them. How do we theorize a labor of love? How do we speak of such experiments? In an iterative process where one learns from one’s mistakes and moves on, does the archive become the new theoretical process? How does one record and reflect? How does one make? How does one love? How does one live?

Endnotes

1 See Studies in Tectonic Cultures – The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, Kenneth Frampton ed. Jahn Cava, MIT PRESS, 1995.

2 Samir Raut mentioned over his lecture that one of the reasons he chose to study architecture is because of his impression that one need not go to office at 9:00AM and second, that he loves to drink coffee.